Egypt, Argentina and US/us

Recently, I watched again Our Disappeared/Nuestro Desaparecidos a fine film by Juan Mandelbaum, who would be visiting the journalism class I teach to talk about making that very personal documentary about the rise of the generals in his native Argentina over three decades ago.  The class met around the time Mubarak was expected to cede power (he didn't for another 24 hours or so) so it was impossible to view one rebellion without the other and, for me, without thinking about the antiwar soldiers I've been writing about who are trying to build a nonviolent, but revolutionary movement.  I thought about the obvious: that one of the central triumphs of tyranny is to convince the tyrannized that no alternative is possible, so rebellion is futile.  And the not so obvious: that sometimes something breaks through and convinces enough people that that's simply not true.  That's not to disregard the movement work that went on behind it -- "spontaneous" uprisings seldom are -- but there is a moment when a movement becomes mass and a people uncontrollable.
       Among the points that Juan made to my students was that, under the successful censorship of the Argentine media, the students and workers in the streets of Buenos Aires knew only what they could see or hear, not what was going on behind high walls and in government offices.  But censorship is never absolute, at least not forever, and in the Middle East, apparently through social and other hard-to-harness media, the idea that people could make real change took hold and grew until it moved from idea to inevitability.  Of course, we've yet to see where that shift in power leads: there's the central problem of what to do once you've won the revolution, and as the aftermath of Peron's return to Argentina proved so searingly, we need to be careful what we wish for.  Military agendas are seldom democratic and even if they were, democracy anywhere is a work in progress.
       Still, I think the reason the Egyptian upheaval has captured the American imagination so fully (all those rebellions all over the place we hear little about) is that we need to believe that word can get through somehow, ideas can have some purchase, and people working collectively can make a difference.  We seem to like believing it more than acting on it for ourselves, but we grow positively misty-eyed when it happens somewhere else.
       Do I romanticize revolution?  Oh, probably.  A long time ago, I heard an interview on the radio with a woman driving a cab in NYC who routinely brought her baby daughter along in the passenger seat.  The interviewer asked the woman if she wanted her daughter to grow up to be a taxi driver too.  "No, she replied, "I want her to be a revolutionary."